2nd Congressional District representative visits Loveland

Larimer County may be the latest addition to the district represented by U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, but he has found that concerns are generally uniform throughout the newly-defined 2nd Congressional District.

He was elected in November for his third term in the U.S. House of Representatives, but it's the first term that saw the boundaries of the Boulder-based Congressman's district move north through Larimer County to the Wyoming border. But throughout his district, Polis said that people care about the same things: Improving schools, strengthening the economy, balancing the budget.

And lately, stemming no doubt from recent scandals and controversies, Polis said his constituents have also expressed concerns over their privacy and how they can limit the access government has to their private lives.

Last week, between checking out a demonstration of LulzBot 3D printers at Loveland's Aleph Objects and hosting a veterans' resource fair at the Pulliam Community Building, Polis visited the Reporter-Herald offices for a conversation about fracking, privacy, Amendment 64 and his excitement about providing the hemp flag that would wave over the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on the Fourth of July.

Living with Sequestration

It's been about four months now since the first across-the-board cuts to government agencies known as "sequestration" went into effect. With the cuts, Polis believes Congress took the "easy way out" to the harder alternative of cutting.

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Cuts he proposed included money for oil and gas subsidies, agricultural subsidies and unneeded military expenditures. If Congress had come to the table and worked toward a consensus, he believes the past few months would have been less painful.

"There would have been better cuts. The wrong answer would have been to make no cuts, so if this is the alternative to no cuts, maybe the sequestor is better," he said. "But the best answer is 'why couldn't Congress sit down like any business would when they have to cut things and say let's cut the things that aren't working?'"

He believes that future-oriented investments like science, research and access to education should have been untouched. In his district, both CSU and CU research dollars were impacted as well as the forest service.

While direct payments to veterans were not impacted by sequestration, the VA did take a hit and was another area where Polis believes cuts should not have been made. His Veterans Resource Fair in Loveland aimed to increase awareness about services and resources for veterans.

"There are great support structures and networks in place and many veterans don't know about them," he said.

Amendment 64

Last November, Colorado voters approved Amendment 64 and joined Washington to become the first states in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana. While the state and individual municipalities have worked to define what that means and how that will work, Polis wishes he had better advice to offer his state when it comes to what the federal reaction might be.

Marijuana remains classified as a Schedule I drug under the Federal Controlled Substances Act, and though there has been a verbal assurance from President Barack Obama that state-legalized recreational marijuana will be a low-enforcement priority, Polis wants to see it in writing from the Attorney General.

"We are hoping for a hands-off approach that allows Colorado to decide its own fate," he said. "Some counties and cities don't allow the sale already and banned it before the law took effect and others allow it and that's completely appropriate. I don't think the federal government should interfere with the decision that Loveland makes or the voters of Colorado make."

In February, Polis introduced legislation to legalize marijuana at the federal level. And in a measure he sees as unrelated, he was recently successful in passing an amendment to the FARM bill he worked on to allow industrial hemp cultivation.

He celebrated that success on the Fourth of July when the American flag made of hemp that he took to the House floor for the debate was displayed atop the U.S. Capitol.

"Hemp has a long tradition in our country as an important crop and I think it has a bright future in our country as an important crop," Polis said.

More Issues for Local Control

Just as each municipality in the state has decided or will decide its path with Amendment 64, Polis also believes each community should have a say in another hot topic: hydraulic fracturing. More often called fracking, Polis is paying attention to the decisions that individual communities are making, including citizen-driven ballot initiatives like the one currently underway in Loveland and a voter-enacted ban in Longmont that sparked a lawsuit from the oil and gas industry.

"I think different communities decide to have or not have an extraction industry in different ways and I think that's completely appropriate," he said. "It's a light industrial activity and so many counties and cities approach it like other light industrial activities."

On the federal level, Polis is working on removing the exemption of fracking in the Clean Air Act, an exemption that went into place more than a decade ago.

"We would then look at the air pollutants that come from fracking like we do other industrial activities," he said.

Privacy

The concerns are not new, but because of revelations in the past few months -- the government's collection of telephone records of millions of Americans, the National Security Agency's Internet surveillance program, the Department of Justice's seizure of Associated Press phone logs -- privacy concerns have come to a head in a big way.

"There's a lot going on on the privacy front and with all of these things that hit at once, Americans are more attentive to this than they have been," he said. "I've been opposed to the Patriot Act and I'd like to see more safeguards in there, but generally I think if the government wants to surveil or wiretap someone, there needs to be a very specific court order with some kind of probable cause as to why they would do that."

Legislation Polis has been involved with includes a Telephone Records Act, which, in response to the AP scandal, would prevent federal agencies from seizing Americans' telephone records without a court order. Similarly, the Email Privacy Act would improve privacy protections for electronic communications stored or maintained by third-part service providers.

The Liberty Act and the Ending Secret Law Act both work toward more transparency with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Together, they would require the Department of Justice to report the number of opinions that are made classified and create a total impact report of the court decisions.

Polis has a strong tech background as a Boulder entrepreneur but said he was "shocked by the scale" of Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of data mining in the United States.

"Certainly I was aware of the government's ability to do this because of the Patriot Act, but I had not been briefed, nor in talking to my colleagues had any of them I talked to been briefed on the scale of this," he said.

Without knowing what specific questions to ask at classified briefings, Polis said that members of Congress are left in the dark.

"Had Snowden gone to a Congressperson instead of going public, a Congressperson could have asked the right questions and maybe prevented this whole debacle," Polis said. "Without knowing what questions to ask, our oversight is meaningless."

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